Maybe it's just paranoia, but Ilona can't help thinking that she's always being followed [Watched]. Odd vans follow her home from her job at the hospital, sometimes she sees strange men standing in line behind her at the store. Only safe at home behind her triple-locked and barred bedroom door and in front of her computer does she feel truly safe.

Though she is good at her daytime job as Hospital Director and Chief of Medicine at Helsinki University Central Hospital [Healthcare Professional, Company Man], she would if she could spend most of her time randomly browsing the internet [Forum Lurker] and lamenting at the progress of technology, or hanging around on #CLASSIFIED#. Amongst her interests include the rather morbid fascination with the lives and deaths of accident victims, following the very cutting edge of VR technology, and the popular VR game Stardust (where she was involved in a scam to subvert the game's economy through gaining access to the developers' database records [Basement Hacker]).

She became involved with the Posthumanist movement in medical school and has followed the various conspiracies avidly, but hasn't yet gotten into the investigating work that many members have. She logs onto the Freenet under the male persona rabbitHACK, and is known in #CLASSIFIED# as a bright guy who probably knows more about the human body, its limits and its capabilities, than anyone else.

Iskra, 38, studied Medicine and History of medicine at Moscow University, and now works at a clinic. She is happy to complement her treatments with holistic methods, believing that they help the medicinal approach work better. Due to this, and her fascination with Slavic mythology, some of her contacts introduced her to the Temple of Pan.

Most of her colleagues at the clinic treat her alternative specialism with casual disdain, but her excellence in the field has allowed her to keep her position regardless of any interference from either them or the Russian authorities. It has meant that she has become fairly well known in her local community, but not to the point where she feels concerned about it. Not until she began experiencing unusual blackouts, where she would occasionaly lose consciousness and wake up hours later, having apparently been in the clinic the whole time. Her colleagues inform her that she is perfectly conscious every time she complains of it - and even treats several patients.

However, one of her colleagues, who confides in her that he follows the posthumanist doctrine, claims that it is the same patient that she treats every time she complains of the blackouts. Her colleague has promised to keep her posted about anything he hears on the matter.

On #CLASSIFIED#, Iskra appears under the handle Vila81, named after a creature from the mythology she studies. She is known on there as a quirky individual with a great knowledge of mysterious happenings across Russia.

Agent Fox William Mulder was born on the 13th of October 1986. When he was four years old his sister Samantha was born.

On the night of the 27th of November 1998 Fox's sister Samantha was abducted from their family home. Fox was only twelve at the time and Samantha was eight. He and Samantha were playing board games, when suddenly the electricity went off, the house began to shake and a blinding bright light shone through the edges of the front door. Mulder remembers Samantha floating out the window and disappearing in a bright light. For months afterward Mulder put up fliers all over his neighbourhood, but his sister was not returned (Hook: Missing Person)

Fox grew up determined to help protect people. He attended the University of Oxford and graduated with a first degree honours BA in Psychology. It was while at Oxford that he got to know and went out with Phoebe Green, who now works as as a criminal profiler for the FBI. (Academic: Psychology).

After leaving university Fox joined the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA). In 2013 SOCA captured serial killer Monty Props thanks to help from the paper Mulder had written at Oxford entitled “Serial Killers and the Occult”. (National Law Enforcement)

Mulder first met The Lone Gunmen in 2014 while working on a case dealing with whistle-blower from a high level chemical weapons lab who had evidence that the government was conducting experiments on the public to test these chemical agents. The Lone Gunmen are a trio of conspiracy theorists, government-watchers and computer hackers who author a news publication called The Magic Bullet Newsletter, of which Mulder is a loyal subscriber. It was the Lone Gunmen who got Mulder into the True Believers and onto the #CLASSIFIED# chatroom.

Mulder discovered The X Files in 2015, a set of unexplained cases in the SOCA files that seem linked to the paranormal, the occult and alien abductions. In 2018, Agent Scully was assigned to work with Mulder on The X Files. At first Scully, a born Skeptic, distrusted what she saw as Mulder's credulity, but has warmed to him (Insider: Skeptics). However, Mulder and Scully have recently discovered that their cases are being watched and in some cases manipulated by someone high-up in SOCA or some other agency (Hook: Watched)

Chuck McGee was born in 1984 in Nebraska. he dropped out of college in 2004, and joined the army.

By 2007, Chuck had been promoted to squad sergeant. While he and his squad were serving in Iraq, they received a new private in transfer. Private “Trigger” Johnson seemed to be competant, smart, and a damn fine shot. On 23rd April 2008, while on routine patrol, the squad's vehicle was overturned by an IED, and they came under attack from a local militia. They managed to hold their position until another squad could arrive to relieve them, and the insurgents were driven off. However, at this point, private Johnson drew a knife and began attacking his squadmates with alarming strength and speed. Taken by surprise, and unsure how to respond, all except McGee were dealt fatal injuries before he managed to put a bullet in Johnson's head. McGee radioed back to base reporting what had happened, but rather than another squad coming to pick him up, a single black helicopter arrived. In a state of shock, he allowed himself to be ushered inside.

The next thing McGee can remember is waking up on the streets of Chicago wearing unfamiliar clothes, carrying no ID, and with a single $100 bill in his pocket. A glance at a newspaper strewn over the ground in front of him indicated that it was 16th May. He spent the next 8 years walking the streets, living day to day through begging and homeless shelters. He told his story to any who would listen, but it was always dismissed as the ramblings of a madman. Attempts to contact his parents were met with the discovery that he had been officially reported “killed in action”, and a funeral had been held with a body present.

In 2017, MGee finally met someone who would listen to his story: a woman who called herself Clarice Carter, who was working at a soup kitchen. She pressed McGee for as many details as he could remember, and asked him to return the next day. When he did, she wordlessly passed him a letter. This contained a time, a meeting place, and four words: “We know the truth”.

The meeting turned out to be with several prominant members of the local survivalist group, Run4Cover. They explained that they had found mention of the incident in Iraq while trawling through some military archives, and had several leads which they wanted his help to follow up. They provided McGee with a false identity and a job, and inducted him fully into their group. With this new information and his new identity, McGee got back in contact with some of his army buddies. Many of them dismissed him as a hoaxer, but some believed him, and now keep their ears open for news of similar goings on. McGee's knack for internet detective work in this sort of area has made him quite a figure in the survivalist community, as well as the other branches of the global militia. The Run4Cover members he initially entered by have also been helping to investigate matters, and McGee thinks that he may, finally, be getting close to the truth.

Time in the Military (Officer) (5)
Basement Hacker (3)
Local Journalist (2)

Born in 1953, Xia was raised on a rice farm and had a childhood of hard labour. Joining the People's Liberation Army at the age of 18, he enjoyed a fast rise through the ranks due to his sharp mind and strong patriotic streak. On the evening of the 3rd of June 1989 he received the order to take his unit into Tiananmen square in order to suppress the protests. The viciousness that he saw that day shook him to his core and while he continued to progress up the ranks he started to look much harder at the government he served and the country he lived in. In 2003 he retired from military and proceeded to start seeking out like-minded individuals who were willing to help ensure that tragedies such as the “June Fourth Incident” did not happen again. Xia makes use of his military connections to gather evidence of the government's misdeeds, posting detailed descriptions and political analysis to a series of blogs.

Recently he has extended his online presence to Freenet, one of the few ways of interacting with those outside of China, and started to visit #Classified# in the hopes of meeting other politically motivated individuals. Unfortunately he has instead found himself deluged with what he considers crackpot theories about aliens, mind control, and the second coming. People who think like this are as much of a problem as tyrannical governments, even those who are suspicious of the government seem to be too caught up in their fanciful conspiracies to see the simple truth of the matter, a government benefits from having its populace not look too closely at its policies, conspiracy nuts can be just as effective at keeping peoples eyes elsewhere as the occasional war or recession. Its not that governments are trying to control you, they just want to stay in power, the faults of the world are simply greed not 1000 year old clans controlling the world.

YourselfMyFriend is widely known on #CLASSIFIED# and its environs as the “voice of reason” on Australia. In its short time as a sealed state, the nation has created nearly as many conspiracy theories as Roswell or JFK; YourselfMyFriend, YMF to his frequent chat colleagues, is widely supposed to be either a refugee or someone with very good contacts inside the Red Rock Curtain. With a quick tongue and a knack for creating punchy, well-connected blog posts that get hits across the target audience, he's quick to dismiss the more ridiculous theories; and equally swift to leap upon any concrete evidence of human rights abuses and other shady activities within the continent, from illicit satellite photography to leaked surveillance footage.

—

Iloai Rokeni was born at 13 Culgoa Circuit, Canberra, in the Samoan Embassy to Australia, in 2000; thus entitled to Dual Nationality. Her parents were on a long-term posting in the diplomatic service, and she was well-educated at an international school. With frequent visits back to Samoa to visit the family, she was generally a happy child - if something of a loner.

By the time the Red Rock Curtain began to come down, Iloai - always a precocious child - had already begun to make a name for herself on various blogs and opinion pages. With excellent grades and interest from a few professional news feeds, she was seriously considering a career in journalism. Her father had introduced her in a casual way to his friends in the New Illuminati, and having gone through the basic initiation to the lodge - a bit embarrassing, frankly - she was seriously considering pumping the organisation for contacts in the media industry.

To this day, she can't be certain whether her forthright and candid stance on blogging exactly what was happening in the streets of Sydney and Canberra - against the advice of her parents - was responsible for the “terrorist” attack on the Embassy that fateful day in 2015. (Mysterious Event)

All she does remember is a bright light; a hissing sound; and one of the Embassy guards shouting “gas, gas” as a creeping mist seemed to fill the air. Afterwards, there were no reports whatsoever of chemical agents being used in any of the Canberra extremist attacks. The next thing she knew, she was waking up in a MedEvac helicopter on her way to the nearest friendly airbase with an oxygen mask on her face and a pounding Headache - a headache that would become depressingly familiar over the following days and months.

Iloai was made a ward of the state until she reached her majority. Her parents' bodies, despite repeated and increasingly furious demands by the Samoan government, were never recovered. Her persistent headaches, insistence that some sort of chemical agent was used in the Embassy attacks, and trauma following her parents' death all conspired to have her committed to a secure ward in an asylum for two years (Time Inside: Asylum). By the time she got out, she was seventeen, disillusioned with the government which had paid her parents and raised her for so many years, and determined to find out the truth no matter what the cost.

Now Iloai makes a living from blogs, contract journalism and political commentary in local papers across Samoa (Local Journalist). She spends altogether too much time on the internet (Forum Lurker), often fruitlessly trying to track down any other survivors of the Canberra embassy bombings. She spends her weekends volunteering for charities seeking to rehouse refugees, particularly those few who manage to flee from under the Red Rock Curtain (Charity Worker), and if she is a little too interested in their war stories - well, it's all in a good cause, and her colleagues have learned to look the other way.

One of her closest friends, Tao Siteti, has known her since the bad days in the secure ward; he used to visit her recently, but she's since been wondering whether he wouldn't be a better candidate for psychiatric care. He's deeply involved with the Temple of Pan, seeking to recreate what he calls the “traditions of my fathers”, revering the Atua and Aitu and ranting about the great Church conspiracy which is trying to keep him down. (Insider: Temple of Pan)

She keeps up her New Illuminati membership carefully, vaguely aware that it's possible her contacts there were the reason her release from the ward went as smoothly as it did once she'd stopped screaming and beating her head against the wall to make the pain go away. She's found many NI members in the Pacific Islands who are as keen as she is to find out the truth about what's going on in Australia.

She still has an Australian passport, for all the good that does without the proper stamps and biometrics. She keeps her online identity, “YourselfMyFriend”, carefully and scrupulously separate from her real name and existence, adopting a male-appearing avatar and usually blanking its face to a dead white mask. She's saving up for the software to scramble her voice patterns.